Banjo Pickin' With George Segal

Actor Tunes His Life To A New Key

April 02, 1993|By Clifford Terry.

George Segal-right, George Segal the actor, the guy who would bounce around on Johnny Carson's couch, waiting in sweet, childlike anticipation until he could jump up with his banjo and start laying into "The Yama Yama Man"-bounces expectantly into the Old Town School of Folk Music.

He is in town for a play-the world premiere of A.R. Gurney's contemporary comedy "The Fourth Wall" at the Briar Street Theatre-and we've taken him over to Armitage Avenue for a rehearsal break. Before long, he will find himself in the middle of a banjo session in which he'll sing about how he ain't gonna study war no more.

Entering the place, he immediately begins tuning his extremely well-worn, four-string, tenor banjo. "It's gorgeous," says one of the several banjo aficionados-students, teachers-who have begun to gather around him.

"I got it in the Valley-San Fernando Valley," he says. "It was made by a guy named Chester, an old vaudevillian, who spins his banjo and does all kinds of stuff. I mean, it sounds like an organ, but it's great."

He wanders into the school's adjacent store. "What a great collection of instruments you have here!" raves the exuberant actor, who has an affinity for turning sentences into exclamations. The sales clerk tells him he's his "hero," then says: "I remember seeing you sing and play on some talk show. Didn't you do `By the Sea'?" Segal nods appreciatively, then whips into "Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown" ("What you goin' to do when the rent comes 'round?").

Now he is being led upstairs to a classroom for a get-together with a group of decidedly unjaded banjo teachers. "What, are you all in G?" Segal asks. "Sort of," someone answers.

They break into "Down by the Riverside," and the guy who made it big time with "Where's Poppa?" and "A Touch of Class" is singing and stomping his left foot like there's no banjo tomorrow. When a photographer stops to change cameras, Segal suddenly stops playing. "Hold it," he says with a sly grin. "I'm a money player."

Then it's on to "I've Been Working on the Railroad"-"Louder," someone says, ironically-and after a while the banjos are put down and there is a considerably lower-decibel discussion about technique. Segal tries his hand at the five-string, which everyone but he has been playing.

"The banjo is the only indigenous American instrument," he will explain later. "The four-string was in all the jazz bands. It's a New Orleans instrument. The five-string is, like, West Virginia. Folk songs. Pete Seeger. The chording is real simple. It's all in G." He pauses for a touch of mock boasting. "I, on the other hand, can play in any key you want."

Humble beginnings

Earlier, he had talked about his musical progression with a writer who, on any stringed instrument, had barely gotten beyond "My Dog Has Fleas."

"I started off with the ukulele when I was a kid in Great Neck (N.Y.). A friend had a red Harold Teen model; it won my heart. When I got to high school, I realized you couldn't play in a band with a ukulele, so I moved on to the four-string banjo."

At Haverford College and Columbia University, he formed Bruno Lynch and his Imperial Jazz Band. In the Army it was Corporal Bruno's Sad Sack Six; in California, the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band.

With his button-down shirt, crew-neck sweater, blazer and khakis, Segal, at 59, looks dressed as he might have as a '50s undergraduate. Through the years, he has been described as having a "Dead End Kid look," and the demeanor of "a cuddly koala bear." At the moment, the Dead End koala is smoking a cigar.

In "The Fourth Wall," he is cast as a Buffalo businessman who moves to Park Avenue at the prodding of his wife (played by Betty Buckley), who has made one wall of their apartment completely-and symbolically-blank. The cast also features Mark Nelson and Jean de Baer (replacing Joan van Ark, who reportedly bowed out over contractual bickering involving hairdressers and limousines).

"I always knew that George had enormous charm and authority with comedy," says director David Saint. "But I had no idea he was so bright and had such enormous heart and gentility. It's always thrilling to me that someone I really like in the movies is not about trappings, but is a real person."

Segal says he can never talk about a play or movie ("They always ask me what it's `about,' and I don't know"), but is willing to give it a shot.